Professor Jonah Siegel

My research focuses on the relations between art and literature from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. I write on novels and poems, but also on criticism, art history, aesthetic theory, and the history of institutions across the period. Very recently I have been working on other cultural forms, notably film and television. 

I am a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton for Hilary term 2025, on leave from Rutgers University where I am Distinguished Professor of English.  

I am the author of Overlooking Damage: Art, Display and Loss in Times of Crisis (2022), Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After (2020), Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art -Romance Tradition (2005), and Desire & Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (2000). In 2007, I published The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources. 

Articles I have published lately include 'The Handover,' Los Angeles Review of Books, August 10, 2023; 'In the Age of Artpocalypse: Beauty and Damage on TV,' Public Books, August 17, 2023, 'Killmonger in the Museum: Fantasy, History, Restitution,' Raritan, Spring 2023; 'Aesthetic Education and the Ubiquitous Bourgeois,' PMLA, Spring 2023, and 'The Point of Vanishing: Pater's Loss of Perspective,' 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2023. 

I am currently working on two projects, a book on the destruction of art objects and collections in popular culture in relation to contemporary concepts of progress and another on the intersection of politics and collecting in the post-Napoleonic period.